No talking!
OK
So last night we went to see CONTAGION, the movie starring Kate Winslet, Gwynneth Paltrow, Matt Damon and just about everyone else.
My review:Â feh.
The biggest problem I had with this movie is that I have seen this before.
Like about a dozen times… if not more.
Same old, same old.
Virus comes from China (how come all the viruses come from China?)
Kills lots of people.
Cut to the CDC where people in inflato-suits figure it out and make a vaccine.
Meanwhile, lots of people die and incidentally, supermarkets run out of stuff.
I remember a similar movie where Dustin Hoffman (of all people) gets into the inflato suit.
Nothing much has changed here since The Andromeda Strain, (where the virus came from Space instead of China… close), but that was the first one, so it gets points of originality.
What is lacking here is ‘originality’.
This point was clearly driven home to me by the trailers that preceeded this re-make.
THE THING! (Coming this October, apparently). A team of scientists trapped in Antarctica encouter this… thing… from…space (not China) that takes over their bodies one by one. They have to figure out ‘who among us is not human’.
Wait a minute!
I saw this movie when I was 12 years old watching Million Dollar Movie on WPIX. Except it as in black and white.
Same movie!
Same plot!
Then, the next trailer is for THEÂ GIRLÂ WITHÂ THEÂ DRAGONÂ TATTOO
But with that guy, the new James Bond, what’s his name…Daniel Craig…
Wait a minute!
I saw this movie also.
Like two years ago.
And it was pretty good.
What’s with the re-make?
In fact, the more I watch the trailers, the more I see it’s the same old same old over and over and over again.
BATMAN, THEÂ DARKÂ KNIGHTÂ RISES
STRAWÂ DOGS
MANÂ OFÂ STEEL
Wait a minute! What am I paying for here?
Television is no different. Every show is pretty much an iteration on another show.
It’s kind of depressing, this lack of creativity.
But there’s a reason for it.
Movies are really expensive to make.
Really expensive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line in every movie. So when a studio has to decide where to place their bets, where to invest their money to be sure of a return, where do they go? A sure thing.
So when a director pitching a movie concept to the studio gets down to the bottom line – will this make any money for us – he has a sure answer: “Of course it will. How do I know? Look at how well it did last time!”
X-Factor begets American Idol begets America’s Got Talent and so on.
Cake Wars begets Cupcake Wars begets Cupcake Battle begets Battle of the Bakeries and so on…
Imitiative, not creative.
And why?
Because ‘creative’ involves a risk. It involves the chance that what you have shot and produced may not work.
It may.. but it may not…
So better to immitate.
Because there is a lot of money at risk here. Hundreds of millions if you are making movies. Mere millions if you are making TV shows.
But with small cameras and laptop edits, you cut the cost of production by, oh, 99.999%.
So there is no risk.
Or very little.
Look, when it was expensive to make books – when they had to be written by hand by monks and it took years to make one, the same anxiety towards creativity was evident.
“What did you write this year, Brother Ted?”
“Leviticus!”
“Again?”
When Gutenberg’s printing press came along, suddenly the cost of making books dropped and we got an explosion of literature – 15 million books in the first 30 years.
OK.
Now we have a printing press for cheap film and video.
Get going.
Stop making Leviticus.
Or Contagion.
